Food is Awesome!

So in between driver's ed, writing, cleaning, and knitting, I cook and I eat. Come to think about it, we sometimes rarely think about what we eat, and sometimes we spend too much energy on our food. This disparity in our food thought totally fascinates me. Why do we automatically prefer to get stuff with 'organic' printed on the package without really thinking about what that means, and why haute restaurants who go all out of their way to re-invent food become popular eateries? My experience in the past three weeks really got me thinking about where food can bring us.
People who know me now see me as a crazy food-lover, she loves what she eats, cares about food, studies food. But hasn't always been like that. I did not start cooking until I three years ago, growing up I was a docile child eating whatever my housekeeper or mother prepared.
I clearly remember this one incident happening when I was four: I came back from nursery school and my mom was too busy to cook lunch. So she bought a lunch box for me, probably from a Hong Kong bbq place.

Something like that

While I was eating, my mom asked, "Do you like it?" (referring to the food) "Yes!" (referring to the styrofoam box) I did not know what I was eating and I really did not care what I was eating. Food is food, I eat what my parents feed me. But the box! It was so cool! The point of my story was, we are socialized to the idea of taste. We were taught to care about what we eat, and how it tastes. As we grew up eating and making food from our cultures, then taste and your demand for that taste develops.
My second experience really contrasts the first: two weeks ago, we went to a really nice restaurant to celebrate a good friend's birthday. It is a real treat, we got a multi-course tasting menu where we get delicate morsels of CAREFULLY prepared food. From selecting ingredients, to executing their cooking techniques, to presentation...

That's not what I ate but you get the picture

The dinner was delightful and the food delicious. However, it was also a baffling experience, every ingredient transformed, and looked and tasted differently. Even though I love cooking and eating, after that dinner I couldn't help but question, are we making too much a fuss to what we eat?

That question opened another floodgate of questions in my head. This was quite unsettling, because I want to pursue a career related to food and community building, and suddenly I felt like I don't know what food means to people anymore. Is eating about being with friends and sharing a meal together? Is eating purely about the search for the next great flavor, next sensation? Is food about tradition, cooking what our mother, grandmother use to make, to learn about our history and heritage? Is it about exchange, mixing of cultures, and bridging differences and borders? Is it about being sustainable, and cooking within the means of our resources? Is it about health, thinking about what we put in our body and how that affects us? 


But food is all the above! And I guarantee we all have countless experiences where food has served all these functions. For a while I was concerned if we have forgotten what great things we can do through food because we were too busy making food taste interesting or look cool, but I don't think that is possible. There is so much history behind our personal and collective food cultures that we always eat for multiple reasons, never just for taste. 


So quickly I made my peace with food: last Sunday, Ming and I went to Sunday brunch with friends at a small Mexican restaurant. The weather was great, the place was warm and friendly, Mexican food was not popular in Hong Kong so I did not eat it growing up. But sitting there digging into a simple burrito, with great company and conversations, not guilty about calories because this is a 2 meal in 1 brunch... I think to myself, food is awesome!